New York

In the last two weeks I’ve been called self-satisfied, low-class, controlling, shallow, sexist, smug, priggish, crazed, repulsive, creepy, trashy, frivolous, provincial, disgusting, and just plain horrible. My crime? I pierced my six-month-old daughter’s ears at the request of my Nicaraguan husband, an experience I wrote about for the nytimes.com‘s “Townies” column. It was fun to…

Today is Saint Anna’s day. You may know her as Jesus’s grandma, as Anna and Joachim were the parents of Mary. Anna is not a flashy saint. She’s no Mary Magdalene (hubba hubba!) or John the Baptist. But for people named Anna, she’s a patron saint. And there may be others who choose her as their…

On Wednesdays the City of Miami Beach screens a movie on the wall of the Frank Gehry-designed New World Symphony Building, and, depending on what the flick is, my husband and I join hundreds of other Miami Beach residents in the park opposite the building to watch it. This Wednesday’s had been on our calendar…

Mother’s Day is a good day to be pregnant. I would like to think that sounds poetic, like the first line of Leonard Cohen’s poem, Days of Kindness, which begins, “Greece is a good place/to look at the moon, isn’t it?” But I fear it just sounds simplistic. Yeah, mother’s day celebrates moms and…

Last Saturday was one of five Saturdays of Souls in the Orthodox Church–days that are set aside to pray for and remember the deceased. I love the idea of having days dedicated to thinking about and communing with loved ones who have passed on to a world beyond this one. It reminds me of a…

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About Eleni

The daughter of a Greek father and a Minnesotan mother. I grew up in Athens, Greece, and the suburbs of Worcester, Massachusetts—
and became obsessed with cultural rituals and traditions along the way.